Surface Area Lab: Incorporating the Real World

I have been out of my classroom all week grading state assessments in ELA and Math.  Needless to say, it has been a SUPER LONG week of work!  I can honestly say that this week, I really have been running on DUNKIN.
I am so jealous of my lesson plans for math!  I'm not in my classroom, but I left a really cool lab for my smarties to practice finding surface area.

I collected a ton of different boxes of cereal, popcorn,  pasta, and tea.  I cut and laminated them to make nets.  I set my room up in stations and am having students practice measuring and finding the Surface Area of all the different boxes while I was away this week.
From what I hear via my teammates my smarties LOVED this lab and I am jealous that I couldn't be there with them!
I was so excited to create all of the different prisms.  I even found a LARGE TOBLERONE box to do triangular prism.. HOW COOL IS THAT!

We practiced measureing in inches and centimeters with all different sizes of prisms, two different size Toblerone boxes, and a square pyramid that I created out of cardboard.  I created a generic form that looks like this:

With all of our new evaluations, I'm trying to put my Common Core Benchmarks right on my worksheets now.


Do you have labs that you use for Surface Area or Volume? Please share!  I want to work on incorporating more of this time of learning next year.  Stop on over and visit Amanda at Teaching Maddeness and link up with her Friday Flashback!

2 comments

  1. What a great reason to empty a few Tobblerone packages!
    :)
    What a terrific activity... I'm pinning it in hopes of doing something similar next year!

    Kim
    Finding JOY in 6th Grade

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  2. Hi Michele, I want to introduce myself. I'm from www.multiplication.com, and I'm featuring your site in one of my articles. I am impressed with your fresh ideas and the way you offer support to other educators. It's a great thing to pool resources. Well done! It is our hope that we can offer educational suggestions, resources and ideas to our readers. Thank you for all you do!

    Jen Wieber, www.multiplication.com

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Thank you for taking the time to comment. I will make every effort to respond back to you!

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